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tele-journeys

ShowingApril 23, 2002 - June 7, 2002

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Carlos Amorales, born in Mexico City in 1970, currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Mexico City. Since 1997, a main aspect of his work has been focused on Mexico’s popular wrestling. Fascinated by the role that masks and fictional identities play in this environment, the artist has created a wrestling persona for himself called “Amorales” to investigate how identity is constructed across cultural and social spaces. His installation at the LVAC will be the first comprehensive showing of his Amorales vs. Amorales series, as well as other works related to the project.

Mark Bain was born in Seattle in 1966. He studied at both MIT and the Rijksakademie, and now lives and works in Amsterdam. He often makes installations in which nearly imperceptible sound registers on the subconscious, or works in which he connects oscillators to architectural structures in order to make them tremble. His project for this exhibition, Sniffer, is a device designed to suspend in the atrium of the Wiesner Building that houses the LVAC and MIT’s Media Lab and intercept wireless data transmissions occurring inside the space. The object, cylindrical in form, looks as if it may have some specific “useful” function; and the signal it collects is a direct audio output of the sound of data (not a synthetic representation)—a registration of the flow of noise that constantly surrounds us. According to the artist, “It is a signal diviner, a transducer of 0s and 1s and speed.”

Mark Bain has had recent solo shows at Galerie Romain Lariviere, Paris, France, and the Rooseum, in Malmö, Sweden. Group exhibitions include In the Meantime, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and others at the Blue Moon Project-Mobile, Groningen, The Netherlands; the Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Fundament Foundation, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Yael Bartana

Yael Bartana, born in Israel in 1970, now lives in Amsterdam and New York. Her video work often addresses the “normal” state of affairs in her native Israel, and in tele-journeys, Bartana presents two such works. Profile depicts young female Israeli soldiers as they pick up, hold, aim, wait, and then shoot guns. Trembling Time is a 7-minute sound/video piece filmed in Tel-Aviv from a highway overpass on Soldiers Memorial Day and depicts a moment of silence as it is observed in traffic while sirens sound throughout the country. The moments of stopping and leading up to it, are suspended and repeated. Traffic slows, begins to stop, slowly converges, and collides. Trembling Time transforms the event into an object and questions the power of ceremony on society and the individual.

Michael Blum, born in Jerusalem in 1966, studied at the Rijksakademie. Blum engages photography, video, multimedia, artist’s works, new media, and installation in his works, which tackle contemporary myths such as globalization, media, and networks. Blum’s video project, Wandering Marxwards, contrasts revolutionary political tracts favored in the 1960s and ‘70s with the politics of the globalized present. It features Blum’s re-reading of Marx’s Das Kapital (150 years after it was written on a different continent) during a voluntary exile to a Rocky Mountain resort, creating bizarre contradictions between what the artist is reading and the setting in which he reads it. The story is a maze of connections from Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Charles Fourrier, and prominent 1960’s figures Louis Althuser and Robert Filliou, to the teachings of Leon Trotsky.

Nabila Irshaid, born in Osnabrück, of German and Palestinian origin, lives in Salzburg, Austria. Her pre-September 11 work Travel Agency (2001) is her first autobiographical attempt, and it has a political impact as her former work refers to more ethnographic range of themes. Irshaid attempts to give a new view on the Palestinians to counter the fact that “TV mediates a rigid image of outraged masses of men shouting, wailing women and stone-throwing or dead children – but nothing else. Mass media seems to keep an eye on the ugly side of the conflict, until now nobody gave a chance to the civilized parts.” She also emphasizes that “Palestinians are as much individuals as every other nation or ethnical group.”

Runa Islam, born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1970, lives and works in London. Although Islam works with a variety of mediums, film has a significant place in her practice, as she examines its narrative structure and relationship to reality. Her short films often last only a few minutes, but recreate iconic cinematic moments and disclose the artificial, constructed nature of filmmaking itself. Islam’s Tuin is based on a particular scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 film Martha, which the artist describes as “an archetypal moment, a filmic mechanism that’s often used for very romantic parts in pop-videos, Bollywood and clichéd Hollywood films where the characters are shot in a 360° rotating view…In Martha it has a very considered use at a pivotal moment in the film where a new character and a new narrative are introduced. As a symbol of a total turnaround it signaled a trajectory of demise for the female protagonist.” Islam states she added the “use of video cameras, given to the actors to film from their own point of view. From their perspectives, the woman gets to look back at the man and her intention was to simultaneously reveal the whole theatre of the set-up. The camera crew, the equipment and the drama are exposed. The 360° track becomes a very important motif.” She adds, “I think the moment in the film when the man eclipses the woman is very important, not necessarily for feminist reasons but for any person whose identity has been overshadowed by another’s.”

Sebastian Diaz Morales was born in 1975 in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina. He studied at the Rijksakademie and now lives and works in Amsterdam. His 15.000,000 Parachutes is a beautiful and moving story of a rural worker in Indonesia who comes to the city of Jakarta and who must daily find the courage to “parachute” off the National Monument without ever finding an appropriate place to land. This anonymous worker is a metaphor for the many millions of such individuals trying to find a place in contemporary urban life.

Sebastian Diaz Morales’ solo exhibition, Compilation of Works from Just Like a That Productions, recently took place at the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany. Other exhibitions include Open Circuit (a collaboration with Jo Ractliffe) at NSA Gallery, Durban, South Africa; the 25th Bienal Internacional de São Paolo, São Paolo, Brazil; International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; RAIN Artists’ Initiative, Network, El Despacho Workshop, Mexico City, Mexico; Impakt Festival, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands; and 2.Biennial Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Tomoko Take

Tomoko Take, born in Osaka, in 1970 is involved in curating, installation, and multi-media performance in addition to her video work. Dutch Wife/Dutch Life (1998) is a videotape in which Take’s mother talks about her life as a woman and a mother in the last decade in Japan. She discusses her various jobs and how she became pregnant by one of her clients while she was working in a “cabaret.” Take’s collaboration with Easy Tune makes live sound an aspect of this performance.

Fiona Tan, of Chinese-Indonesian and Australian descent, was born in 1966 in Pekan Baru, Indonesia. She grew up in Australia, and studied at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and now lives in Amsterdam. Tan takes exception to the “one world” fantasies of globalization. To make her 60-minute documentary film, May You Live in Interesting Times (1997), Tan visited family members around the world dispersed during the anti-Chinese turmoil in Indonesia in the 1960s. She has stated “I aim with this project to investigate and hopefully deepen the current discussion of such hashed terms as: multiculturaly, migration, and transgression.” In her video installation Rain (2001), torrents of rain pour into a bucket, unceasingly measuring time, while a dog nearby looks on unperturbed.

Fiona Tan had her first solo exhibition in the U.S. at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Tan participated in the 2002 Yokohama Biennial, and the 2001 Venice and Berlin Biennials, as well as the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial.

CURATOR INFORMATION

Joan Jonas’ experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were crucial to the development of many genres of contemporary art from performance and video to conceptual art and theater, and she is one of the foremost practitioners of these art forms working today. She has been awarded fellowships and grants for choreography, video, and visual arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the CAT Fund, the Artist TV Lab at WNET/13 (NYC), the Television Workshop at WXX1 (Rochester), and the Deutsche Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Germany. She received the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize at the Tokyo International Video Art Festival, the Polaroid Award for Video, and the American Film Institute Maya Deren Award for Video. Jonas has collaborated with composers such as Alvin Lucier to develop collaborative video-performance works, and has performed and toured with The Wooster Group. In 1994 Jonas was honored with a major retrospective exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands in which she transformed six performance works into installations for the museum, and another retrospective exhibition was organized in 2000 by Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany. Her recent work explores the relationship of new digital media to performance. Recent solo exhibitions/performances have been held at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles, Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Jens Hoffmann, born in San José, Costa Rica, 1972, is an independent curator and writer based in Berlin. He has worked for institutions and exhibitions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Portikus Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; documenta X, Kassel; and Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Among the exhibitions and projects he has curated are A Little Bit of History Repeated, Berlin (2001); exhibition2, Stockholm (2001); Au-Delà, Berlin (2000); Indiscipline, (co-curated with Barbara Vanderlinden) Brussels (2000); Blown Away – 6th Caribbean Biennial, St. Kitts (1999); Destination Is Wherever It Arrives, London (1999); Tropical Modernity, Barcelona (1999); and Berlin/Berlin - 1st Berlin Biennial, (co-curated with Nancy Spector, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Klaus Biesenbach), Berlin (1998). With American artist Joan Jonas, he is currently co-authoring Perform, a publication on contemporary performance, for Thames and Hudson, London. Upcoming curatorial projects include Invited to Invite, as part of MANIFESTA 4, Frankfurt (May, 2002); The Show that will Show that a Show is not only a Show, Los Angeles (June, 2002); Writing An Exhibition, Caracas, (August, 2002). Hoffmann is a frequent contributor to Trans>Arts.Cultures.Media, NU: The Nordic Art Review, and Flash Art International.

Jane Farver is Director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center since 1999. Prior to this position, Farver was Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, NY, director of Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York in the Bronx; and director/curator at the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. Exhibitions she has organized include Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora; Cai Guo Qiang, Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century; Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art; Yukinori Yanagi: Project Article Nine; Luis Camnitzer: Retrospective; Luca Buvoli: Flying - Practical Training for Beginners; and Adrian Piper: Reflections 1967-1987. Her exhibition with catalogue, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, toured nationally, and she was one of six guest curators for the 2000 Whitney Biennial